Wild swings in polls leave forecasters all at sea

By Toby Harnden

12:00AM GMT 02 Nov 2000

EVER since this presidential election started in earnest in the summer, the opinion polls have swung so wildly that virtually any theory about who is going to win and why can be supported by polling data of some sort or other.

In the CNN/USA Today Gallup poll alone, the "lead" has changed hands between George W Bush and Al Gore no fewer than eight times since September. Even if one of the candidates opens up a clear lead in the polls by Tuesday, the actual result will be far from certain.

In 1996, the polls predicted a Bill Clinton landslide of up to 18 points whereas in the end his victory over Bob Dole was a relatively modest eight per cent. In recent years, only in 1980 were two candidates so close just a few days before the election. Supporters of Mr Bush can take comfort in the fact that in that year Ronald Reagan was able to increase his narrow lead significantly in the final week and in the end won by 10 per cent.

Four years earlier, Jimmy Carter had held large poll leads over President Gerald Ford throughout most of the campaign, but the gap narrowed significantly immediately before the election and he won by just two per cent. Ford advisers still maintain that their man would have prevailed if the election had been held even two days later.

Perhaps the best comparison with 2000 is the 1960 election in which John F Kennedy beat Richard Nixon by little more than 100,000 votes. Mr Nixon was winning on Labour Day, at the beginning of September, but by the end of that month Mr Kennedy was just ahead. Opinion polls on the eve of the election put the two neck and neck.

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The increasing sophistication of polling methods has tended to make results more difficult, rather than easier, to predict. One of the key problems is how to assess how many people will turn out to vote. Pollsters disagree on how many of the undecideds at this late stage will actually vote.

Errors can also creep in because questions are asked only by telephone. Only "registered" rather than "likely" voters are surveyed. In the New York Senate race, one poll has Rick Lazio leading by five per cent while another puts Hillary Clinton seven points ahead, a result of different estimations of turnout in different parts of the state.